China earthquake: Beichuan ruins to become museum and memorial

The crumpled ruins of Beichuan, the most seriously damaged major town in the Sichuan earthquake zone, are to be preserved and turned into a museum and memorial.

By Richard Spencer in Beichuan

6:40AM BST 23 May 2008

The local government wants it to become not just a place to remember the 8,600 dead of the town, almost half its population, but somewhere the Chinese people can learn to prevent similar disasters.

After securing the town's collapsed and leaning homes, schools and office blocks, it wants to leave them as they are rather than demolishing them.

"It is early days but a final decision needs to be made by the state council," said Zhang Jie, a spokesman for Mianyang city government, which overseas the town.

Beichuan sits in a cleft in the mountains which rise up from the rice growing plains of Sichuan to the Tibetan plateau to the north. It was only built in 1951 - the town's original site was ironically considered too much of an earthquake risk.

The valley also sits on the well-known Longmen or Dragon Gate seismic fault, which triggered the quake. In the aftermath of the quake, landslides from both sides of the sheer valley engulfed the two halves of the town.

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The question of what to do with the survivors of this and other shattered towns and villages is one of many huge logistical challenges for the government. It issued an international appeal for 3.3 million more tents to house the homeless.

It also increased the official death toll to 55,000 with 29,328 still missing. Of the survivors, it said 4,000 were orphans, though no decisions will be made about their future until the situation with the missing becomes clearer.

The authorities are also faced with a more immediate challenge with regards to Beichuan than its long-term future.

Above the town, more landslides have formed a natural but unstable dam with a reservoir now grown to a quarter of a mile long, on the river about three miles away to the north. It is one of 34 similar "barrier lakes" formed across the region.

Engineers are trying to decide which of several options to use to release the pressure before the dam bursts and floods the valley.

Even if that danger is surmounted, it is now "certain" that Beichuan will never be rebuilt where it is, its party secretary Song Ming told state media.

"It is impossible to rebuild the county seat at the original location or nearby," he said. A new location will probably be found on lower ground 12 miles away.

Mr Zhang said turning the town into a memorial would raise difficult questions about whether to seek to exhume the remaining hundreds of bodies from the wreckage.

He said 80 per cent of the buildings in the old part of town and 60 per cent in the new part were flattened.

However, the plan was welcomed by some of the remaining residents. "It's so sad so many people died," said Mr Ling Kaishun, 54, who had just carried his 97-year-old father back to where his home once stood from a refugee camp.

Like many of the people in the area, Mr Ling comes from the Qiang ethnic minority group to whom Beichuan county is the major home and who only number 300,000. Many of those have died.

"This can be a remembrance of history," Mr Ling said. "We really should carry this plan out."